Mary Umberger

ColumnistOn Real EstateWriter

Mary Umberger is a former columnist for the Chicago Tribune. When she started covering residential real estate at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1990s, she thought it would be a short-term gig until a "real" reporting job opened up. Then she discovered she liked it, and the housing market experienced the biggest boom in its history. She's still here, having chronicled the housing market's ups and downs. Umberger aims to put the endless, confusing barrage of housing data into human terms. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Umberger attended Ohio State University and interned at the Columbus Dispatch, Detroit News and at the Tribune. After graduation, she worked at the Akron Beacon Journal and then returned to the Chicago Tribune, where she had various editing posts before taking that "short-term" job as a real estate writer.

Recent Articles

Legacy Development Group, like countless other businesses, reacted to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11 by canceling an event scheduled for that afternoon. The real estate developers had been expecting about 100 people to show up to put down deposits on condos at Prairie...

Tracey Silverstein wanted to sell her North Side condominium. She talked to a neighborhood real estate agent about representing her and her husband in the sale. If they had chosen that agent to handle the sale, the agent would have been paid in the traditional way: a commission based on a percentage...